Then fetch it:

Merge it with your local code:

Resolve any possible conflicts (i.e. go through each file and edit it as necessary), commit and push them, and you’re done!

Hopefully the network graph will show you a nicely updated graph in your timeline ;)

So it was a “very interesting” Saturday evening+night: the computer doing its stuff, while I cursed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs indistinctly. You can’t appreciate enough how fast the Ubuntu installation is, until you have to reinstall Mac OS or Windows again. How can they be that DAMN SLOW?!

Anyway, I managed to install Visual Studio and all that. I have even installed cygwin so that I can keep using a decent command line and git. I have set up a remote repository on a server, so that I can share the changes between computers too. Not that I think I’m going to touch much code in the Linux computer, but it’s good to have that. Just in case the laptop data gets corrupted or something :)

I have fixed the couple of bugs I had from Friday –nothing too serious, just some errors not being checked– and the “demo” is working as expected: the song is loaded, a simple triangle is shown in the screen while the song is playing and when it finishes, the demo exists. However there’s a bit of cracks and distortions here and there… I might probably have broken something in the SorolletVoice class while fixing something else, so what I’m going to do is to compile the VSTi for Windows, and compose the song using Renoise on Windows. After all, it’s all the same format at the end… and that way I can make sure that what I heard in Renoise is more or less the same than in the demo!

And the final paragraph is dedicated to Iq: the size of the simplest program that uses my player (the one which does a WAV dump) is 86kb, Release. When kkrunchified, it goes down to approximately 31kb. But my demo is using SDL… and that simple program doesn’t even open a window or output any sound anywhere, so I tried to load your 64k framework in Visual Studio 2008 –with the hope of using it as a base instead of using SDL– but it systematically refused to compile :-( There are errors in some structs from the events file, but I can’t quite get why, because they look perfectly fine to me. Maybe you’re using VS2005?

Recently I was about to start a project where I didn’t know quite well what direction it was going to take. So I was there, experimenting and hacking code here and there while investigating where would it bring us, when I realised that I would like to have a snapshot of the code at that point, before continuing with the next part. The classic solution would have been to make a .zip of the code folder, or a copy of the folder in the above directory, and continue. But if you want to compare between versions, manually calling diff between file versions is cumbersome. I didn’t want to add the code to the subversion repository because it was by no means ready yet for anything. So I though: why don’t I use git for this?

First steps were a bit uncertain, but I quickly developed a simple yet effective command line technique. Yeah, no IDE plug-in whatsoever, I am just using a bash terminal. It works pretty much like this:

• code code code
• looks good! let’s store this…
• git add file1.cpp file2.cpp ………. or git add . for adding all changed files to the commit
• git commit (so that I can enter more than one line of commit message, in the editor that shows up) or git commit -m ‘commit message’ for one liners.

Sometimes, when I want to see what has changed, I use gitk. It is admittedly ugly but once you get it, it’s nicer than reading plain diff output in a terminal screen. Specially because you can navigate between changes, instead of having to manually invoke diff for each file you want to compare.

At a certain point I wanted to make a huge code change, so I made a new branch. Actually, I haven’t gone back to the other branch since then, but it’s good to know it’s there in case I want to see how the code is in that totally incompatible code and class-wise approach to the problem.

Probably one of the things I like more is that everything is lightning fast. Since the repository is stored locally, there is no more waiting for commits to finish or contacting the server for getting a diff. Even if your Subversion server is in your local network, it will never beat the experience of a localhost, direct disk access based repository. This way, one doesn’t get distracted with the check in/commit process; it becomes an almost automatic action so the mind can be focused in the real problem: the code!

If you’re an advanced git user, you might have already realised that I am only using a very reduced set of git features. Whether that’s sad or not, I leave it up to you; I just wanted to highlight the notion that although git is generally used (or was designed) for huge projects with lots of collaborators branching and merging intensively and all that, it is actually very good for producing what I call code sketches, and it doesn’t need to be used by several users with all the clone, pull, push and rest of single-worded verbs paraphernalia to enjoy its power.

Please don’t understand this post as a subversion sucks, use git square-headed litany, but rather as a friendly git could be quite useful, if you have some spare time you might consider having a look at it suggestion from a long-time Subversion user who knows Git is intimidating but worth the effort to learn :D

So you type this in, frantically:

and then before it happens again, you edit your .gitignore file (which as the user’s manual helpfully points out, should be in the top level of your working directory) and make sure it contains the following lines:

Or if you’re using subversion, you can set the svn:ignore property:

You may want to make sure there isn’t a previous value for svn:ignore with

and if that’s the case, probably “merge” them so that you don’t lose those values.

While we are on it we could also add Thumbs.db to the list, but since I haven’t used a Windows system for developing in a long time, I don’t need to do that (lucky me!)

But I’m still not completely keen on using them, because there are two things that can be done only with subversion: checking out only a folder, out from the complete hierarchy. And externals.

Although technically one could check out only a folder with git (or that’s what I could deduct from what I read), it is still kind of awkward/buggy and very far from being as intuitive as it is with subversion. When I looked for info in mercurial docs, it directly said it wasn’t possible.

Now it seems google code is offering project owners the possibility of switching from subversion to mercurial, but I am going to keep using subversion there too. I don’t think anyone is going to want to branch any of my supersnippets but you never know ;) — I moved the project to github! You can now branch it if you want :D

You may argue that I could do with lots of mini git repositories for each folder I might possibly want to check out, but knowing myself as I do, that’s just calling for a disaster to happen. I would probably forget to clone/update the most important repository before going offline, you know, that kind of things. It works better for me to keep a single repository with a nice hierarchy of miniprojects that I might occasionally extract or use as externals in other projects.

Just give me those two features and I will be completely convinced to switch to a DVCS (i.e. Distributed Version Control System) :-)